Reading the Contemporary Author

Alison Gibbons is a reader in contemporary stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author or coeditor of several books, including Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives (Nebraska, 2023); Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism; and Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language. Elizabeth King is the author of The Novelist in the Novel: Gender and Genius in Fictional Representations of Authorship, 1850–1950.

“A brilliant exploration of new manifestations of authorship in the twenty-first century. Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King provide a powerful through line that reveals transformations in how we approach the subjectivity and intent of the author amid the digital revolution, the relation to identity politics, complex interactions of fact and fiction, and the role of authorial reflexivity as a process of epistemological and self-examination that extends beyond metafictional play. Through an original outside-in structure, Reading the Contemporary Author is a compelling narratological inquiry into how changing concepts of the author have played a central, mediating role in how we read and interpret the increasingly uncertain thresholds of texts and contemporary life.”-Virginia Newhall Rademacher, author of Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative “The articles in this valuable work provide a foray into the multifarious nature of contemporary authorship, demonstrating that, although our conception of authorship has taken many forms and will take many more, the author always remains a pivotal, often controversial, site of analysis.”-Marjorie Worthington, author of The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction “An important contribution to the knowledge of contemporary authorship but also to contemporary narrativity and contemporary narrative genres, including biofiction, autofiction, memoir, novels featuring novelist narrators, and more.”-Sylvie Patron, author of The Narrator: A Problem in Narrative Theory